DAD
by Fressia Whitehead
My father and I were driving in San Clemente, California. I had just finished my third straight semester as a full-time student. I was also working full-time and since I had two weeks off from school I decided I needed a vacation from work as well. My father had flown in from Texas and I had driven over from Arizona. Most summers he met up with some old firefighting buddies at the beach. They would surf and boogie board like they were still sixteen instead of the retired firemen that they are now. As we were driving down Pacific Coast Highway my father pointed out a part of beach to me.
"Right there was where I got hit by that car. You can't tell now that they've moved the highway back, but the highway used to be a lot closer to that cliff. When that lady hit me I had to drag myself with my hands over to the cliff and yell for help." I asked him more about what happened. He was eighteen and had just graduated from high school. That day he had been surfing and was later sitting on the back end of his mother's car taking off his wetsuit. He had his left leg dangling down with his foot resting on the bumper and the other was pulled up near his chest as he was pulling the wetsuit off. There was a car parked right behind him and as he was taking off his wetsuit another car rear-ended the one behind my grandmother's. It pushed the parked car into my dad's leg, crushing it badly. He later found out that the woman driving the car had been high on drugs. He got a settlement that he later used to take my grandmother and himself to Germany. He had multiple surgeries to repair his leg.
My dad's life had always been somewhat of a mystery to me. I knew his mother was from Germany, that my father was a convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, that he was born in Canada and that he didn't know who his father was, his mother had died when he was 19, and his brother had died when I was one or two. I had always been curious about my dad's life, but what little I did know of it, seemed horribly sad and bleak and kept me from digging deeper. My dad was a generally happy guy. Growing up it seemed like everyone I met would tell me how great of a guy my father was. To my young mind there was no way that the dad I knew could be a result of the few stories that I had heard. By contrast, I felt I knew everything about my mother's life. She came from a strong family, I knew both my grandparents on my mother's side, especially my grandfather, so I got a very good sense of how she grew up. I also knew all of my aunt's and uncles as well as 28 of my 29 cousins by name (the one I did not know died before I was born) and felt fairly close to all of them. Family get-togethers on the Gleason side were always filled with stories, some I'd heard before, and many I had not. There was a sense of continuity in my mother's life that made me feel connected to her history. My dad's history was just a story that maybe I had read in a book somewhere and attributed to him. So driving down PCH I decided to find out as much about my dad's life as I could in those few days. After all, we were right were he grew up and we were going to spend an evening visiting with his family in Pico Rivera, the town that was my parent's home, so I would have more sources than just him. His history was my history and since I didn't know much about his, I felt like I didn't know much about my own.
On the way to my dad's cousin's home we went by the house where he grew up. As we pulled into the cul-de-sac I asked him if he remembered his address. "Of course I do. 9043 Canford Street." He pointed two doors down where his friend John Becomo lived. This was a name that was very familiar to me. He and his father had come to visit my dad when I was younger and I remembered it. I remember my mom took pictures out in the front yard of all of them. I remembered how excited she was that dad's friends had come to visit. "This neighborhood raised me," my dad said as we stopped in the middle of the cul-de-sac. I didn't know if he was actually informing me of this or just reminiscing. It was such a quaint neighborhood I felt nostalgia for a place I had never lived but seemed to hold so much information on who my father is and was. Later my dad told me more about growing up. "My parents, to put it legal and without painful detail, were irreconcilable."
Summer vacations were often spent with his Aunt Neda in Los Angeles, or with his Uncle Fritz in Mexico. "My Uncle Fritz in Mexico has always been my favorite. I remember a fishing trip in the Gulf of Mexico or Baja California, exactly which place, I can’t say, but we went out to sea in a 20 foot open boat with a small motor. A bucket was fastened to a bench with a piece of rope. Five of us were in the boat, all adults except myself. I was about ten years old. Too late to change boats and well out to sea, we discovered the boat to have a hole in its bottom. Water flowed into the hull at a steady rate, and everyone now realized the purpose of the bucket. I spent the day bailing water as the others fished. Returning to shore Uncle Fritz forgot to point the boat’s bow into the breakers. He remembered when a wave smashed into the transom and washed a few of us into the surf. Often our trips together were mired with small misfortunes that added to the adventure but revealed a lack of planning that I think has pervaded my thinking and followed me throughout my life." I didn't really see that "lack of planning" in my father. But I had known for years that he felt that way about himself. I looked at my father and saw a man with a very well planned life. He had a beautiful wife, five beautiful, respectable children who were all one another's best friends, and had always had a steady job that left his family wanting nothing. I think his "lack of planning" feeling came from the "small misfortunes" in his life. But like he said, these, "added to the adventure."
As a child, my father’s cul-de-sac consisted of the children of parents that planted roots in one area and then lived the rest of their lives there, usually never moving. His friends were more like siblings than friends. How otherwise could 12 families live in homes within speaking distance, where the goings and comings rarely go unnoticed and the names of people are associated by the familiar sounds of their cars coming home from the store and work. Everyone in the “sac” knew where the fathers worked or where the kids went to school--some public, some religious, some private. They were all different colors, religions, nationalities, but those things always went unnoticed. When they played games, teams were picked by consensus until it worked out to everyone’s pleasure. When baseball was the game and Johnny or Nicki hit the ball and it struck the Nuner’s home (the Nuners were mean, snobby outcasts) or worse their car in the driveway, not one of the children had to yell, “Run!” The teams exploded like fireworks into backyards and behind trees waiting for the “coast to clear.” The bravest of the children, often the most reckless and prone for trouble, always emerged first.
When Ruben, one of the oldest kids, tried to steal a car and was shot by a cop in the process, the younger children were told the shooting was an accident and Ruben hadn’t done anything wrong. That had to be the story or something similar to it, so the older kids would remain high on the pedestal where the younger kids had placed them.
When a family did move away, it was usually because they did not seem to fit, and their departure must have occurred in the dark of night because it went unnoticed. Their replacements were quickly evaluated, if they had too many toys, then they probably had too much money to fit in.
Mike Schramm, the father of Susan, would drink with the rest of the parents and then fall into a deep sleep usually on an aluminum recliner, the type found around swimming pools. He was a fun and loud Irishman, but when he slept, it was deep and still, which made it easy for the dad’s to pick up the recliner with him in it and carry it to the center of the sac where he’d eventually wake up to all of the kids standing around in silence impatiently waiting for the gag to unfold so they could have their baseball diamond back. The circle of the sac belonged to the kids, and if you parked your car in it, or worse your drinking buddy, you were guilty of infringement (the kids probably called it something else with fewer syllables).
They all grew up, of course, went separate directions, but the memories still hold forever binding them as something more than friends and not less than siblings. Even Ruben managed to stay on the pedestal. Now, he owns a large trucking company in California and never had another spat with the law. But then he never did really; it was just an accident.
We pulled onto cousin Sharon's street and I recognized her house one the corner. I had only been there once before, and it was odd to remember it and feel a connection. There were five or six children playing out in the front yard and three men standing out front talking. My dad and I got out of the car and one of the men said, "Well if it isn't Pauly!" Everyone who knew my dad when he was younger called him "Pauly" and sometimes my mom still called him that. This was Sharon's husband, and he and my dad chatted for a while and then we went to the door where Sharon was pulling my eighty-three year old Great Aunt Erna and the woman my dad called "Aunt Nida" to the door in order to see us. "Oh Pauly! It's my little Pauly!" Aunt Erna yelled my dad's name in her thick German accent and covered my dad in hugs and kisses. Then my dad asked if she remembered me. "Oh, yes, beautiful Fressia. So beautiful." Aunt Erna began to hug and kiss me and hold my hand and wouldn't let go. She was so short, I was a good three inches taller than she was, and I realized that I ought to be grateful that I got as tall as I was.
They all began reminiscing and I started to talk to my Great Aunt Erna about my Grandmother. I had heard growing up, that my grandmother just adored my dad. He was the oldest of her three children and she seemed to favor him. My grandmother died when my dad was 20 years old. He was serving an LDS mission in Canada at the time she suffered a stroke. I remember hearing stories about how many people showed up for her funeral and how many people loved her.
"Igrid," (with Aunt Erna's thick German accent my grandmother's name seemed to have three syllables, ING-A-RID), " and me lived with our grandparents. They ran a hotel. Men would come over for dinner and they would say, 'Dance for us Ingrid!' And she would get up on the table and dance and make them laugh. She was so funny. And smart." Aunt Erna would emphatically tell me this over and over again throughout the evening. "Ingrid was the smart one. She always got good grades and the teachers would say, 'Erna why can't you be more like Ingrid?' But I could paint. She was smart and I could paint." Her stories all melded together she began to tell me how my grandmother had scared away people that had been picking on her. "Ingrid didn't take shit from nobody! No! She protected me all the time." I asked her about World War II and Hitler. "I loved Hitler. Hitler was good for Germany. He did some bad things, and I was sad to hear about it. But Hitler was a good man. I was a Hitler Youth. My grandmothers friend was Jewish and we hid him in our kitchen. The Nazi's came to the door and my grandmother said, 'We have no Jews here,' and they left."
I learned that my grandmother had left Germany for Canada when she was about 30 years old. She was the first one of her family to come to the American continent. This is where my dad comes into the story as well as where the story becomes vague. There isn't a lot known about my father's paternal ancestry. The dad my father knew was not his biological father, and his siblings were both from different fathers.
Home-life for my father wasn’t all that kids hope for. There was no structure; my grandmother wasn’t concerned with his grades, or even whether he attended school. He had no rules, chores or responsibilities. Though his mother loved him greatly, it was the neighborhood and aunts and uncles that brought him up.
I read something my dad wrote in a sort of personal history of his. "The weekends I stayed home were dark affairs that I block from my consciousness. I hated Sundays. Friends that served as security often left with their parents to visit family, leaving me without safe harbor, so I waited for Monday, taking long walks without purpose other than to put distance between me and what I feared. Actually it sounds worse than it was. Much of it was created by my own insecurities as a child, no one to blame, really. All of us go for long walks." I remember thinking, "Isn't that just like my dad? He wants no one to feel sorry for him or pity him." But the truth is that he had a really rough life. Driving through that cul-de-sac and listening to my father talk about his neighbors, and the people who "raised" him saddened me. I wished that I could have been there, hung out with my dad and his friends. I wished I were there to be his friend when all his friends were gone on Sundays.
by Fressia Whitehead
My father and I were driving in San Clemente, California. I had just finished my third straight semester as a full-time student. I was also working full-time and since I had two weeks off from school I decided I needed a vacation from work as well. My father had flown in from Texas and I had driven over from Arizona. Most summers he met up with some old firefighting buddies at the beach. They would surf and boogie board like they were still sixteen instead of the retired firemen that they are now. As we were driving down Pacific Coast Highway my father pointed out a part of beach to me.
"Right there was where I got hit by that car. You can't tell now that they've moved the highway back, but the highway used to be a lot closer to that cliff. When that lady hit me I had to drag myself with my hands over to the cliff and yell for help." I asked him more about what happened. He was eighteen and had just graduated from high school. That day he had been surfing and was later sitting on the back end of his mother's car taking off his wetsuit. He had his left leg dangling down with his foot resting on the bumper and the other was pulled up near his chest as he was pulling the wetsuit off. There was a car parked right behind him and as he was taking off his wetsuit another car rear-ended the one behind my grandmother's. It pushed the parked car into my dad's leg, crushing it badly. He later found out that the woman driving the car had been high on drugs. He got a settlement that he later used to take my grandmother and himself to Germany. He had multiple surgeries to repair his leg.
My dad's life had always been somewhat of a mystery to me. I knew his mother was from Germany, that my father was a convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, that he was born in Canada and that he didn't know who his father was, his mother had died when he was 19, and his brother had died when I was one or two. I had always been curious about my dad's life, but what little I did know of it, seemed horribly sad and bleak and kept me from digging deeper. My dad was a generally happy guy. Growing up it seemed like everyone I met would tell me how great of a guy my father was. To my young mind there was no way that the dad I knew could be a result of the few stories that I had heard. By contrast, I felt I knew everything about my mother's life. She came from a strong family, I knew both my grandparents on my mother's side, especially my grandfather, so I got a very good sense of how she grew up. I also knew all of my aunt's and uncles as well as 28 of my 29 cousins by name (the one I did not know died before I was born) and felt fairly close to all of them. Family get-togethers on the Gleason side were always filled with stories, some I'd heard before, and many I had not. There was a sense of continuity in my mother's life that made me feel connected to her history. My dad's history was just a story that maybe I had read in a book somewhere and attributed to him. So driving down PCH I decided to find out as much about my dad's life as I could in those few days. After all, we were right were he grew up and we were going to spend an evening visiting with his family in Pico Rivera, the town that was my parent's home, so I would have more sources than just him. His history was my history and since I didn't know much about his, I felt like I didn't know much about my own.
On the way to my dad's cousin's home we went by the house where he grew up. As we pulled into the cul-de-sac I asked him if he remembered his address. "Of course I do. 9043 Canford Street." He pointed two doors down where his friend John Becomo lived. This was a name that was very familiar to me. He and his father had come to visit my dad when I was younger and I remembered it. I remember my mom took pictures out in the front yard of all of them. I remembered how excited she was that dad's friends had come to visit. "This neighborhood raised me," my dad said as we stopped in the middle of the cul-de-sac. I didn't know if he was actually informing me of this or just reminiscing. It was such a quaint neighborhood I felt nostalgia for a place I had never lived but seemed to hold so much information on who my father is and was. Later my dad told me more about growing up. "My parents, to put it legal and without painful detail, were irreconcilable."
Summer vacations were often spent with his Aunt Neda in Los Angeles, or with his Uncle Fritz in Mexico. "My Uncle Fritz in Mexico has always been my favorite. I remember a fishing trip in the Gulf of Mexico or Baja California, exactly which place, I can’t say, but we went out to sea in a 20 foot open boat with a small motor. A bucket was fastened to a bench with a piece of rope. Five of us were in the boat, all adults except myself. I was about ten years old. Too late to change boats and well out to sea, we discovered the boat to have a hole in its bottom. Water flowed into the hull at a steady rate, and everyone now realized the purpose of the bucket. I spent the day bailing water as the others fished. Returning to shore Uncle Fritz forgot to point the boat’s bow into the breakers. He remembered when a wave smashed into the transom and washed a few of us into the surf. Often our trips together were mired with small misfortunes that added to the adventure but revealed a lack of planning that I think has pervaded my thinking and followed me throughout my life." I didn't really see that "lack of planning" in my father. But I had known for years that he felt that way about himself. I looked at my father and saw a man with a very well planned life. He had a beautiful wife, five beautiful, respectable children who were all one another's best friends, and had always had a steady job that left his family wanting nothing. I think his "lack of planning" feeling came from the "small misfortunes" in his life. But like he said, these, "added to the adventure."
As a child, my father’s cul-de-sac consisted of the children of parents that planted roots in one area and then lived the rest of their lives there, usually never moving. His friends were more like siblings than friends. How otherwise could 12 families live in homes within speaking distance, where the goings and comings rarely go unnoticed and the names of people are associated by the familiar sounds of their cars coming home from the store and work. Everyone in the “sac” knew where the fathers worked or where the kids went to school--some public, some religious, some private. They were all different colors, religions, nationalities, but those things always went unnoticed. When they played games, teams were picked by consensus until it worked out to everyone’s pleasure. When baseball was the game and Johnny or Nicki hit the ball and it struck the Nuner’s home (the Nuners were mean, snobby outcasts) or worse their car in the driveway, not one of the children had to yell, “Run!” The teams exploded like fireworks into backyards and behind trees waiting for the “coast to clear.” The bravest of the children, often the most reckless and prone for trouble, always emerged first.
When Ruben, one of the oldest kids, tried to steal a car and was shot by a cop in the process, the younger children were told the shooting was an accident and Ruben hadn’t done anything wrong. That had to be the story or something similar to it, so the older kids would remain high on the pedestal where the younger kids had placed them.
When a family did move away, it was usually because they did not seem to fit, and their departure must have occurred in the dark of night because it went unnoticed. Their replacements were quickly evaluated, if they had too many toys, then they probably had too much money to fit in.
Mike Schramm, the father of Susan, would drink with the rest of the parents and then fall into a deep sleep usually on an aluminum recliner, the type found around swimming pools. He was a fun and loud Irishman, but when he slept, it was deep and still, which made it easy for the dad’s to pick up the recliner with him in it and carry it to the center of the sac where he’d eventually wake up to all of the kids standing around in silence impatiently waiting for the gag to unfold so they could have their baseball diamond back. The circle of the sac belonged to the kids, and if you parked your car in it, or worse your drinking buddy, you were guilty of infringement (the kids probably called it something else with fewer syllables).
They all grew up, of course, went separate directions, but the memories still hold forever binding them as something more than friends and not less than siblings. Even Ruben managed to stay on the pedestal. Now, he owns a large trucking company in California and never had another spat with the law. But then he never did really; it was just an accident.
We pulled onto cousin Sharon's street and I recognized her house one the corner. I had only been there once before, and it was odd to remember it and feel a connection. There were five or six children playing out in the front yard and three men standing out front talking. My dad and I got out of the car and one of the men said, "Well if it isn't Pauly!" Everyone who knew my dad when he was younger called him "Pauly" and sometimes my mom still called him that. This was Sharon's husband, and he and my dad chatted for a while and then we went to the door where Sharon was pulling my eighty-three year old Great Aunt Erna and the woman my dad called "Aunt Nida" to the door in order to see us. "Oh Pauly! It's my little Pauly!" Aunt Erna yelled my dad's name in her thick German accent and covered my dad in hugs and kisses. Then my dad asked if she remembered me. "Oh, yes, beautiful Fressia. So beautiful." Aunt Erna began to hug and kiss me and hold my hand and wouldn't let go. She was so short, I was a good three inches taller than she was, and I realized that I ought to be grateful that I got as tall as I was.
They all began reminiscing and I started to talk to my Great Aunt Erna about my Grandmother. I had heard growing up, that my grandmother just adored my dad. He was the oldest of her three children and she seemed to favor him. My grandmother died when my dad was 20 years old. He was serving an LDS mission in Canada at the time she suffered a stroke. I remember hearing stories about how many people showed up for her funeral and how many people loved her.
"Igrid," (with Aunt Erna's thick German accent my grandmother's name seemed to have three syllables, ING-A-RID), " and me lived with our grandparents. They ran a hotel. Men would come over for dinner and they would say, 'Dance for us Ingrid!' And she would get up on the table and dance and make them laugh. She was so funny. And smart." Aunt Erna would emphatically tell me this over and over again throughout the evening. "Ingrid was the smart one. She always got good grades and the teachers would say, 'Erna why can't you be more like Ingrid?' But I could paint. She was smart and I could paint." Her stories all melded together she began to tell me how my grandmother had scared away people that had been picking on her. "Ingrid didn't take shit from nobody! No! She protected me all the time." I asked her about World War II and Hitler. "I loved Hitler. Hitler was good for Germany. He did some bad things, and I was sad to hear about it. But Hitler was a good man. I was a Hitler Youth. My grandmothers friend was Jewish and we hid him in our kitchen. The Nazi's came to the door and my grandmother said, 'We have no Jews here,' and they left."
I learned that my grandmother had left Germany for Canada when she was about 30 years old. She was the first one of her family to come to the American continent. This is where my dad comes into the story as well as where the story becomes vague. There isn't a lot known about my father's paternal ancestry. The dad my father knew was not his biological father, and his siblings were both from different fathers.
Home-life for my father wasn’t all that kids hope for. There was no structure; my grandmother wasn’t concerned with his grades, or even whether he attended school. He had no rules, chores or responsibilities. Though his mother loved him greatly, it was the neighborhood and aunts and uncles that brought him up.
I read something my dad wrote in a sort of personal history of his. "The weekends I stayed home were dark affairs that I block from my consciousness. I hated Sundays. Friends that served as security often left with their parents to visit family, leaving me without safe harbor, so I waited for Monday, taking long walks without purpose other than to put distance between me and what I feared. Actually it sounds worse than it was. Much of it was created by my own insecurities as a child, no one to blame, really. All of us go for long walks." I remember thinking, "Isn't that just like my dad? He wants no one to feel sorry for him or pity him." But the truth is that he had a really rough life. Driving through that cul-de-sac and listening to my father talk about his neighbors, and the people who "raised" him saddened me. I wished that I could have been there, hung out with my dad and his friends. I wished I were there to be his friend when all his friends were gone on Sundays.
1 comment:
I think I must have found this one by just clicking on your name after you left me a comment. I don't know sometimes I just get places and have no idea how I got there.
Post a Comment